How to Practice Joy (and why it matters)

Contributing our collective power to turn the tide

I’ve long been told that my work was fluffy and somewhat under-researched, even as I got my PhD after seven years’ study. The whole point of my research was to make the visible, invisible - what I mean by that is that I tried to strip back the things we take for granted; to use a Thinking Environment phrase, the 'untrue limiting assumptions that we live as true’. This revealed a virtual consensus across nearly 400 respondents, that the future (specifically, of community education, but let’s extrapolate) should be one of connection, collaboration, equality and - let’s name it - love.

I have come to understand that joyful practice is the how of this. And I’m not alone. Greater thinkers than me have been coming to similar conclusions. You’ll find joy in the changemaking work of Brené Brown, Karen Walrond, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Christina Donovan, Shawn Ginwright, Simon Sinek, Ruchika Tulshyan, Emma Dabiri, carla bergman, Susan David, Erica James and Lynn Perry Wooten, Megan Reitz and John Higgins - and my long-time inspiration Rebecca Solnit. It’s everywhere in Michelle Obama’s latest book. And the original purveyor of joy, a sad loss in 2022, bell hooks.

We are all angry at how the world is. The pandemic years revealed our ‘normal’ to be an appalling mess. Our changemaking practices are disciplined and deeply effective - not fluffy at all. We are critical but never cynical and therein lies the difference. We build up, rather than tear down. We are discerning in choosing which hills to die on. That very anger against the inequalities of the world is the energy we channel into joy. I wrote here about how 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza gave us the word ‘potentia’ to describe a process of joyful activism which is connected, collaborative, equal and imbued with love.

The tide is turning. There is love enough in the world if we choose to turn it outwards, instead of only turning inwards to our tiny social units (there’s a time and a place for that too, of course, and it’s fundamentally part of radical rest). Joyful practice is a discipline that we can choose to practice. Like any discipline, the more we do, the better at it we become.

I’m not naïve (another easy accusation) and I stay informed about what’s happening in the world. I no longer waste energy defending the way I choose to live. I am hopeful. That’s hope-as-weapon (as Rebecca Solnit defines it). I don’t sit around waiting for hope, I use it to break my way through the fear, cynicism and despair created by the monsters in our midst (real and imagined).

We joymakers practise joy habitually. We practise all the time; that’s the trade-off. We don’t have overwhelming goals; let others have them but we are not convinced change is made that way. Or maybe it’s a pincer movement, let’s hope so. Ours is a process ontology. Changing the fabric of society - how we are with one another - by persistent, consistent, tiny acts of microjoy. And people are here for it. Combative binaries have never been less popular and we are waking up to the fact that human (and nonhuman) interaction does not have to be this way.

This next year, I want to finally write the book on joyful practice that has been sitting in my head for the past few years. Yes, I’m adding to a canon of great stuff that’s already out there. But I need to disentangle the threads, get them onto the page and into action. I’ve been thinking more about what joyful practice looks like - and how to do it.

Step 1 - Pause

Not so easy, you say, in a world of busy. Perhaps a way of reframing this is to acknowledge how ‘busy’ is caused by most people refusing to pause. Much of my work these days takes place in the UK further education service, known as FE. If that’s not your manor you’d perhaps be astonished to learn how often the work in FE is deemed ‘urgent’. Outside of an acute safeguarding issue, nothing in FE is genuinely urgent (the hospital emergency room is a stark counterpoint). Everything in FE seems urgent because ‘we’ collude in it being so. We can just stop this. FE is not A+E.

Pausing takes many forms, the simplest of which is just three deep breaths. Go do this in the bathroom if you have to. If you don’t have time for a loo break, the system is broken. Call it out, affirmatively but firmly: “I would prefer not to…” (plait my legs for several hours, for example).

Pausing is in itself an ‘act of insurrection’, of resistance. If enough of us do it, in a workplace for example, and are prepared to hold the line, the culture of that workplace will change. Systems will take longer to change, and keep dragging culture back to the status quo, but once we pause, we notice, and once we notice, we can begin to call out the systems, processes and hierarchies which we live as true, but which could be different. Don’t hand your pausing power to anyone else. You don’t need permission to take reasonable time to think, breathe or rest (and if you do, the system is broken). None of us do our best work when we are exhausted. And much can be accomplished in little time - a ten minute Thinking Environment pair, for example. Compare this to how much of the ‘busy’ in meetings is just empty noise.

Step 2 - Notice

When you pause, you notice. Maybe you notice tension in your own body. Maybe you remember the tone of someone’s voice or a non-verbal message which passed you by. Taking a moment to read the dynamic in a meeting can be illustrative. Doing a full body stretch can be energising.

Once you pause, you can find silence in the noise and really listen to the person who is speaking to you. Or get to that thought that’s in the back of your head every time you do a certain task: "why do we need to do this?” You will never get there, without these moments when you alight in a pause and take notice.

It may help you - as it does me - to think of these moments as joyful activism. They are moments which resist despair through the practice of taking notice, with all your senses, including intuition.

Step 3 - Practice

It’s time now to understand the power of microjoys: small affirmative actions that come out of pausing and noticing. It might be a few words of appreciation - sincere, succinct and specific - that enliven someone’s day. It might be giving way at the same junction each time you pass by. It might be a smile in the supermarket queue, or a tin of beans in the foodbank trolley. It might be putting your very small change in a charity box. Imagine, if those of us who can rounded up to a pound every time we had chance! It’s easy to say, the Government should do that. True, maybe, but they will not. Though it’s a microjoy in itself to send an email to your MP, asking for them to campaign for affirmative change.

Connect, too, with non-human energies. Stroke the cat, take the dog for a walk and notice what’s around you with all your senses. You don’t need me to lay down all the arguments for connecting with yourself in nature. Often the things we most need to do are exactly what we don’t do.

Take the energy you might otherwise use for an argument or a social media pile on and make that a joyful action. Ask yourself, does this need to be said, or to be said in this way? This is how you channel your anger, fear, frustration and despair into joy. You will need to do it ten times, then a hundred, then a thousand. And you will need to tell others what you are doing, so they can do it too. These ‘minor gestures’ (how did I forget to mention Erin Manning at the start?) are what will build up to changing you, changing the people around you, changing the world. I know it. And after all, isn’t it worth a try?

I experienced despair often in 2022. There were times where it felt everything was going to shit, from the personal to the global. I dug deep into practising joy as a coping strategy, getting me through minute-by-minute (a great example of this are the broadcasts I do each morning, as much for myself as anyone else. They take approximately 12 minutes of my time and the payback in energy is exponential). But by the time the summer came around I’d stopped pausing and noticing. I was doing microjoy work on autopilot (without steps 1 and 2) and it was finding its mark much less often. It took an extended period of radical rest (ironically, a long distance solo walk) before I began to notice the ripples coming back to me in everything I read, heard, and saw. Now my faith is back, my hope is back and I’ve stopped seeing monsters around every corner, even when they are actually there. Come join me and many many others in joyful practice. Let’s change the world in 2023.